The last few times I've flown, I have wanted to work on my laptop and InDesign crashes on start up. After the first crash, I get a dialog box that says "Do you want to start automatic recovery?" and no matter which option I choose (yes, no or cancel), it crashes immediately following this prompt.

The really odd thing is once I get to my destination and am back on land, it works properly again. This is extremely frustrating and I would appreciate any work-arounds to this strange phenomenon. Does it have something to do with being offline at startup?

That's a new one for me, but it wouldn't necessarily surprise me if it had to do with lack of a network connection. I'd be more inclined to think it was a problem with the default printer, though. Is this a subscription or regualr license version of ID? I've certainly run ID on my laptop without a network connection in the past, but I'll go fire it up and check now.

I signed up for the in-flight wireless service and voila! I was able to open InDesign without crashing. Now I'm back on land, and online, and it works. But this still does not solve the problem as to why InDesign won't work when I'm offline. I would appreciate knowing some kind of reason for this problem and if anyone knows a work around for this problem. PS: it has only happened over the past 6 months, previously, it worked fine. PPS: I own my copy of Indesign, it's not a subscription. But that does raise the question about subscriptions... do they only work when you are online?

What can you tell us about your computing environment? Do you ever connect to network drives? Do you work directly off a Dropbox? Do you have a Time Capsule? Is your laptop provided by an employer? Do you log into a VPN?

Also, this conversation seems to imply that the only time you are ever disconnected from the net, ever, is when you're on a plane. Can you recreate this simply by turning off all network access?

Lastly - if you can recreate the issue for experimental purposes without needing to buy a plane ticket then posting your crash report on Pastebin might give us some additional clues.